The
first act of The Scorch Trials begins
to recapture the sense of mystery that made its predecessor The Maze Runner an effective
little puzzler. Like the first film, this movie throws us right into the middle
of a mysterious place, about which we have as much information as the story's
hero. We and he have none, really, and so we're all learning as we go. It's
obvious this particular locale isn't as much of a riddle as the Glade and the
maze that surrounded it from the first film, but surely, this facility in the
middle of a desert certainly possesses some secrets.

Why are
the participants in the experiment of the maze here? What do the people who run
the place want with them and other participants of other mazes? Why does the
leader of the place select a handful of these guinea pigs every day, and to
where do they go? There are answers, of course, and they arrive fairly quickly
after our hero and a new ally do some basic sleuthing. After we get those
answers, though, we're even more in the dark than when we began—and not on
account of some new layers of mystery. The answers here make us wonder what the
reasoning behind any of this—not to mention everything that came before
it—actually is.

What
this sequel reveals is that the elaborate scheme created by the "evil"
organization, which is trying to save humanity from a debilitating plague (It's
such a dastardly goal) but still serves as the collective antagonist of the
series, exists solely for there to be an elaborate scheme. There's no internal
logic to the plan, but it definitely gives the heroes an excuse to run and fight
ad nauseam.

The
story picks up almost immediately after the conclusion of the preceding film.
Thomas (Dylan O'Brien) and his fellow Gladers have escaped the maze and learned
that it was a test performed by WCKD (the "World Catastrophe Killzone
Department," whatever the hell that means), led by Ava Paige (Patricia
Clarkson). Another group took the survivors into a helicopter, and Thomas
awakens upon the group's arrival at a remote facility, which is under attack by
people who have been infected by a neural disease brought about by a massive
solar flare.

The
Gladers and the inhabitants of the other mazes are immune to the disease,
although this movie suggests they might not be. Of course, since this flies in
the face of WCKD's plan to harvest the immune people's blood to create a cure,
the screenplay by T.S. Nowlin (adapting James Dashner's book) never mentions
this vital information again.

Anyway,
things obviously are not what they seem at this place, despite the seemingly
good nature of Janson (Aidan Gillen), the facility's head. Soon enough, Thomas,
his old friends from the Glade, and a few new (read: disposable) acquaintances
are on the run in the wasteland called "the Scorch." They're looking
for a resistance group that might be able to protect them from WCKD (It's
pronounced "wicked," but based on what it stands for, wouldn't it be
"wocked" or "worked"?).

Everything
that worked in the first film—the isolated locale, the details of a makeshift
society, the aura of mystery—is tossed aside here. The sequel expands the
geographic scope, but it only offers a generic, post-apocalyptic landscape. It
provides more characters (Giancarlo Esposito and Rosa Salazar, as the leader of
the resistance and his pseudo-daughter, play the most notable newcomers), but
they're even more poorly defined than the established characters, who become
anonymous here, too.

There
is plenty of information revealed as the story progresses, but those
explanations are as redundant as the plot, which goes from chase to chase
(through an assortment of drab places—an abandoned mall, a warehouse, a sewer,
a collapsed skyscraper), with an occasional fight serving as a mild interruption
to the monotony. Speaking of monotonous, the dialogue in these action sequences
consists almost exclusively of repeated shouts of "Go," "Come
on," "Let's go," "Move," or some combination of those
exclamations. It grows tiresome and annoying pretty quickly, especially since
the yelling seems to have replaced any attempt to establish or further define
these characters.

This is
such a considerable dip in quality from the first film that one suspects some
sort of changing of the guard has occurred, but no, the cast, screenwriter, and
director Wes Ball have all returned for this installment. They're simply working
with far less intriguing and far more frustrating material. The Scorch Trials is a reminder that bigger is not always better,
that some questions are better left unanswered, and that change is rarely
welcome when it spoils a good thing.